LAUSR

Assistive listening applications can be grouped into two categories: public announcements and live reinforcement. Each has unique needs. For public announcements, system temporal latencies of hundreds of milliseconds are irrelevant. For live reinforcement, temporal latencies are much more critical—especially in large venues where the assistive signal must be synchronized with the visual presentation and acoustic performance. If the assistive signal is recorded with the intent to preserve stereo imaging of the performance, binaural latencies are also critical; one millisecond can produce severe comb filtering while tens of milliseconds can produce echo. Digital audio streams take time to encode, transmit, receive, decode, and present to the user. While reviewing the technical requirements for digital audio streaming in this application, and to demo the effect of latency offsets, a G.722 wideband stream will be broadcast within the room to a handful of binaural devices available to the earliest attendees.